Flying Madness - Have you flown lately?

Flying Madness - Have you flown lately?

Keith and I just got back from our very relaxing and enchanting honeymoon cruise in the Caribbean. The cruise was very delightful but I should tell you the trip didn’t begin so smoothly. It all began with the flying madness on August 25 with Air Canada. Our flight was supposed to leave at 0700 however it was delayed by an hour and a half due to a "technical communication problem" within the airplane. I got to thinking why on earth wasn’t this problem noticed and resolved hours before the flight departure??? Shouldn’t airline companies have frequent maintenance checks of technical systems on the night before a flight or maybe early on in the morning before they start boarding passengers on that plane????? Shouldn’t these technical problems be monitored and solved efficiently??? What are all those exorbitant airfares and miscellaneous fees we’re paying for? Do they just get pocketed by the big wigs in the airline companies? Is it too much for a paying customer to expect this much from a service provider?

Needless to say, that one problem ended up escalating to more problems for me and Keith that day. Since our flight was delayed, we missed our connecting flight to Fort Lauderdale from Toronto. We were supposed to be at Miami that night, enjoying our paid stays at Hilton Miami Hotel, instead we ended up at Ramada Hotel in Montreal. Why Montreal? Well, since we missed our connecting flight at Toronto and the next flight out of there to Miami was not till 3:40 pm (by then it would be too late because the cruise ship was going to sail out at 4:00pm), we opted to fly to Montreal. The following morning we caught a 9:00 am flight to Miami. I was really disappointed with Air Canada. I have flown with Air Canada so many times, but not as many as other people but I’ve had my fair share of late flights with Air Canada. I can’t put up with that anymore when other airline companies seem to not have any problems with their flight departures.

Another thing I’ve decided from that trip was that I will avoid connecting flights at Toronto. It’s one thing if you’re connecting for a trip within the country but when you’re flying out of the country is another thing. I didn’t really like having to take a shuttle bus from a domestic terminal to an international terminal. Couldn’t they just be all in one building?? I’ve flown to Toronto before and it has never bothered me before but with this recent maddening experience I’m kinda not happy about it. The one inconvenience with these separate buildings was that when Keith and I missed our flight to Miami and we had to fly out to Montreal that same afternoon, we had to run around collecting our baggages. Our baggages were tagged for Florida so it was at the international terminal. We had less than 2 hours to collect our baggages and check ourselves in again for our flight to Montreal. After we’ve spoken with a customer representative about our flight change, he directed us to collect our baggages at Cart 1, so we waited at cart 1 but it wasn’t there. We had to ask another airport staff and told him about our situation. He said well your luggages will be at the international terminal because we were supposed to be at that terminal for the flight we missed. So off we went out of the domestic terminal and we just missed the shuttle bus. Luckily another one came along with 5 minutes. We went inside the international terminal heading towards the baggage claim area and this lady airport staff stopped us and said we couldn’t go in cause we didn’t have the appropriate boarding pass. Fair enough but couldn’t she escort us in to grab our baggages since there were two of them there sitting by the desk. No she couldn’t, we had to find another staff to escort us in. When we found a staff to escort us in, we walked pass by the lady airport staff. After we’ve collected our luggages, which took a while, we walked out the same way we came in without our staff escort because she left as it was taking a long time for us to find our luggages. This lady airport staff stopped us again and asked us where the escort was and we said she left because it was taking us a long time to find our luggages. It looked like she was going to say something else but we just interrupted her cause we were running out of time and we didn’t really want to miss another flight. I was livid by this time but now that I think about it, she was just trying to make sure the luggages were not stolen. If that was here reason for stopping us again, they why did she not just check our photo ids and compared the name to the luggage tags. Then I thought, even if she did that how would she know that we didn’t change the tag to show our names? (Keith and I wouldn’t actually do that!!) Maybe that’s why she wanted the escort staff to come along with us. However, even though we had an escort staff, she wasn’t standing close to us, in fact she was chatting with other staff, so she wouldn’t have seen if we change the luggage tags (again we’re not going to do such a thing). Oh well!! Anyway, on top of all this chaos we managed to make it onto our Montreal flight.

After that it was smooth sailin as soon as we got onto the cruise ship and we’ve forgotten about that incident. I just thought to share with everyone what we’ve experienced and hopefully you won’t have to go through it.

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